Saturday, November 17, 2007

I love LA?

I flew from San Francisco to LA today, home for a whole week for Thanksgiving. Words cannot express how thrilled I am to be somewhere I have almost no friends, where I can just sit around. It's sort of sad that I have to leave town in order to really force myself to relax and get sleep and watch those Netflix that have been sitting around since September. But, here I am.

Leaving a week early for thanksgiving as an "adult" somehow reminded me of that first Thanksgiving weekend during college, when leaving those friends you'd known for two months felt absolutely traumatic and wrenching. Breaks always felt like that back then. Now, life is much faster paced... things move so much faster, it's almost like we don't have time to feel wrenched. Either that, or we're just more mature.

Sometimes when I'm talking to someone who is leaving town for a bit, or when I'm leaving, or what have you, I end up talking like we're not going to see or communicate with each other for a painful or at least inconvenient amount of time, but the reality is that we are all online again within minutes. Or sending text messages. Or something. I guess when I was a freshman in school, I didn't have a phone, and I didn't sit around on IM over break - at least not all the time. So communication was less frequent over breaks back then. Because I have this weird, visceral memory for temperatures and lighting, I am currently flashing back to winter break freshman year. I remember talking to Pablo online, and I remember an e-mail from Miguel who had just watched Bridget Jones and, and this should speak to the fact that it was freshman year and I know weird people, felt like the "Nice guys don't kiss like that -- oh yes they fucking do" was really validation of his entire "nice guy" shtick. I feel like it was cool that year here, and sort of blue and shadowy. I think I remember someone calling me on New Year's Eve... which baffles me a bit, partly because I can't remember who.

It's very upsetting to me that my entire, embarrassing, awesome Diaryland.com diary has disappeared. It documents not only those first breaks, but my entire last year of high school -- a formative moment for anyone I should think.

As usual, upon my arrival to LA I felt like I was coming into a bit of a foreign land, and I felt as though I hadn't been here in ages, although the reality was I was here in September, for a weekend. It is a strange place -- it looks different from everywhere else. The smog is sort of weirdly futuristic feeling, like: post-apocalyptic. And I'm saying that on a pretty clear day. I was thinking about this today -- I don't think I couldn't ever live here again, even though I love San Francisco and the Bay Area. It's more like -- if I lived here, I would become a worse, or at least lazier, less challenged, version of myself. It's kind of easy to live here, everything is at your fingertips, everything comes to you, everything in LA takes 20 minutes (to quote Cher Horowitz' dad), you drive everywhere. The sad thing is that I'm kind of prone towards taking the easier option, possibly in part because I grew up here, and also just cause I think I can be kind of lazy, or stressed enough not to consider the possibilities that may not be totally obvious, whatever it is. So I can see it being easy to settle into a routine here, but I wouldn't want to do that.

Still, it's nice for a holiday. All I've done thus far since arriving here is help (er, I trimmed green beans and drank some chardonnay in the kitchen) make dinner, eat dinner, watched on DVR the winning play Stanford made against USC earlier this fall (it was so awesome, really -- I mean, the sheer horror on the faces of the SC fans), watched three episodes of Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, and stand/sit around talking to my parents. This is exactly what I want my vacation to be.